Category Archives: Mechanisms of control

The criticism of anti-feminists follows clear gendered lines. Their hatred of women leads them to paint their equally hated critics as performing femininity. Anti-feminist advocates such as conservatives, “anarcho-capitalists” and libertarians, MRAs, Objectivists and evolutionary psychologists portray themselves as ultra-rational and logical, independent and courageous thinkers, anti-emotional, having a high degree of confront.

Fundamentalist Christians and nerd culture are exceptions: Christians cannot see themselves as ultra-rational due to the openly anti-intellectual and anti-rational nature of Christianity, and nerd culture is marginalized and therefore feminized itself.

Critics are always portrayed as hysterical, over-emotional and irrational, responsible for everything that happens to them, homosexuals, desirable targets for all kinds of violence.

To sociopaths, everyone else is an Other, everyone else is feminized. Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf:

The great majority of a nation is so feminine in its character and outlook that its thought and conduct are ruled by sentiment rather than by sober reasoning. This sentiment, however, is not complex, but simple and consistent. It is not highly differentiated, but has only the negative and positive notions of love and hatred, right and wrong, truth and falsehood.

He is also reported to have said:

Do you know the audience at a circus is just like a woman. Someone who does not understand the intrinsicly feminine character of the masses will never be an effective speaker. Ask yourself: ‘What does a woman expect from a man?’ Clearness, decision, power and action.

It’s interesting to note that those masses he talks about are at least half composed of men. Likewise, anti-feminists do not mind attacking men, even when they pretend to stand for “men’s rights,” “human rights” or believe in male superiority.

I have previously analyzed three rhetorical strategies that are relevant:

There’s also another strategy I have not written about yet (I do plan to do so at a later time), which is scapegoating. The primary characteristic of scapegoats is that no abuse against them is too great, and that there is a natural psychological tendency to escalate cruelty against them. This applies to various hated groups such as people of different religions and “races,” criminals, children, women, and critics also enter into this category.

If critics are labeled as feminine, then it behooves us to see it for what it is: the product of woman-hatred and the association of that hatred with the hatred for any form of criticism shared by these ideologies. All closed, dogmatic systems of thought must generate hatred criticism by necessity. An actually rational person does not hate criticism, but analyzes it critically (is what is said true? is there a vested interest?). The fact that they hate criticism proves that their supposed rationality and much vaunted capacity to confront are facades.

All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.
Tennessee Williams

This “ultra-rationality” manifests itself in a variety of ways:

* The reframing of their emotions as “rational” and their opponents’ emotions as “irrational.”
* The over-reliance on specific empirical data points, even when such data is insufficient or irrelevant.
* The invalidation of personal experience, even when said personal experience is credible and not used to justify any scientific statement.
* A tendency to either reject altruism altogether or to be suspicious of people’s motives to an obsessive degree.
* The assumption that human actions are, or should be, logical/rational/selfish; The reduction of humans to logic and/or Universal Reason (“man as rational animal”/homo economicus).
* The over-reliance on detecting logical fallacies (especially when no argument is being made) as a substitute for critical thinking.
* Assumption that the status quo requires no further evidence, but the demand that anything that goes against the status quo, no matter how obvious, be proven beyond doubt.
* Radicalism and constructionism are inherently suspicious and are sometimes lumped in with some vague idea of “Communism.”
* The over-reliance on “just so” stories, imaginary narratives, stories, parables, and other attempts at exploiting the imaginary.
* As an extension of the previous point, hiding subjectivity under a veneer of objectivity, and denouncing the opposition’s objectivity as subjective.
* The pretense of being high confront.
* Hiding one’s values under the guise of being “value-neutral,” “free from bias” and “just looking at the facts.” Rejecting empathy, compassion and other interpersonal considerations is called “rationality,” and of course such considerations are framed as feminine.

(perhaps the best example of ultra-rationality in the media is the show Bones, where the titular character is profoundly irrational about anything not directly related to her work but still believes she’s the smartest person in the room)

This last point really cannot be overemphasized. Consider the astonishing fact that empathy and kindness are considered to be “female traits.” What does that tell us about masculinity? And what does that tell us about ideologies which reject femininity?

I don’t think it takes a lot of thinking to realize that, if one defines oneself as being outside of, and superior to, empathy and kindness, then one is likely to be a pretty hateful person and to disguise that hatred under the guise of “rationality.”

Beyond this, empathy and suffering exist beyond reason and cannot be explained rationally, therefore the ultra-rational cannot take it into account, even if they wanted to.

The obsessional is a conformist, constantly splitting emotions off from intellectual operations, and thus presenting a kind of cold rationality or hyperrationality. This type flourishes in families and institutions that promote order for order’s sake, “Prussian” values, sexual suppression, monetary discipline, envy, and affectless intellectualism.
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

Why use the term “ultra-rationality”? Because overemphasis on rationality, crowding out empathy, common sense and holistic (non-linear) thinking, turns rationality into an abstract, subjectivist, self-reinforcing dogma.

As has been often noted, most recently by the organization Deep Green Resistance, misogyny and anti-environmentalism go hand-in-hand: the way a society demeans women takes part in the same principle by which we disvalue children, other animals, and the land (women are routinely associated with all these things). It is therefore no wonder that ideologies which use femininity as an insult also disvalue these things as well.

It always makes me laugh when people accuse me of holding to unrealistic positions or of not accepting the more pragmatic solution. When have I ever even shown an inkling of desire to be pragmatic or conciliating? When have I ever refused to follow the truth? Pragmatism is the watchword of people who refuse to think.

That being said, I do want to examine the objections of people who argue that gender abolitionism cannot “work,” mainly because their arguments are similar to those used against the abolition of other institutions or social constructs, like religion, class or hierarchies in general. Therefore I think this issue goes to the core of what radicalism is all about.

1. Gender is innate.

I’ve already discussed this quite a bit, so I won’t spend a whole lot of space on this one, but it is a common response applied to any social construct. The first line of defense that will form around any social hierarchy is pseudo-science which endeavors to “prove” that it is “a fact of nature.”

So you get early anthropologists telling us that centralized power and religion are marks of “civilization,” phrenologists showing us the “criminal head,” and sociobiologists “discovering” that gender is a biological fact. Actual science never confirms these “discoveries,” but that never gets in the way of their supporters.

Even if gender actually was innate, it’s unclear how that would mean gender cannot be censored to some extent. After all, we all agree that the desire for sex is innate, but there are people who voluntarily choose a life of abstinence, and most of us do not have sex on a constant basis. We also agree that man is a social animal, but there are people who live without human contact.

So while gender being innate would make it impossible to eliminate it, it wouldn’t mean that gender cannot be mitigated.

2. Gender is so ingrained in the fabric of society that it cannot be eliminated.

I’m sure people said the same thing about slavery, too. Granted, we still haven’t eliminated slavery, but at least it’s illegal and marginalized everywhere, which is more than I can say for genderist brainwashing. Even if gender could not be eliminated, I’d settle for “genderism is now illegal and marginalized in all countries, and its proponents are considered the scum of the Earth.” How would that not be a victory?

Any hierarchy as major as gender will be integrated within all levels of society and will look intractable. And yet we fight against them because of their destructive effects on society and the world. Capitalism is a major enemy of human life, so we oppose it even if eliminating it looks impossible from our perspective. Gender may be the oldest hierarchy in human history, but its destructive effects means we must oppose it regardless of pragmatic considerations.

3. Gender can be abolished, but the results would be catastrophic.

Traditionalists love to turn into doomsayers when the issue of advancing any social issue turns up. The standard traditional genderist storyline about abolishing gender is this: feminism leads to gender equality, and gender equality leads to the destruction of the family structure, which is the foundation of civilization, so that would end Western civilization as we know it. Cue the explosions.

The masculine and feminine roles, clearly defined above, are not merely a result of custom or tradition, but are of divine origin…

Nothing is more important than a boy becoming a masculine man and a girl becoming a feminine woman.

Helen Andelin, Fascinating Womanhood

Since feminism was mottled together out of a deep disdain for God’s perfectly created order for men and women, it fueled the desire to rebel against the foundations of family. Therefore, the erosive movement was able to gain intense momentum as it was paired perfectly with a societal shift. Our nation became less concerned with foundations, more influenced by European Marxism, and sought out the Babylonian cry for feminism among women, and later brought along men, who all reject God. Suddenly, the use of the once sacred mortar of our foundations of God, Constitution and iron-clad families of strength, were abandoned to pursue anti-godly endeavors and selfishly built altars of sin.

It was inevitable by this point, that this movement would begin the most corrosive of all forces to weaken the fortress of family, and bring down the entire societal house of cards; from the inside out.

Granted, I’ve picked some of the most extreme examples: I think most traditional genderists believe that feminism and gender equality are deleterious but not fatal, and probably don’t attribute every single detail of our gender roles to God itself.

The basic principle remains the same: whenever some construct is threatened, they use fear to try to keep people in line (does it ever work?). I’ve referred to this a couple times on this blog as the Argument from Armageddon: if belief in X disappears, then society as we know it will collapse.

4. Gender can be abolished, but it would destroy individuality.

Independent Radical reminded me of this one in the comments. There seems to be this weird belief that the end point of feminism is some androgynous dystopia where everyone looks and acts the same. I first ran into this argument in One Life at a Time, Please, by Edward Abbey, where he states that the future of society under feminism is one of “unisexual, interchangeable, replaceable units of desexed semihumanity.” His argument is ridiculously simple: feminists want women to be more like men, therefore their ultimate goal is to homogenize everyone.

But this argument is completely backwards. It is gender that homogenizes people and suppresses individuality. How could eliminating gender, and having a population of individuals free to dress and act however they want, create more homogenization? Although I see nothing wrong with androgyny as a concept or a strategy, I see very little merit to that argument.

5. Abolishing gender is bigoted because it would go against people’s self-identification.

Again, I will not take a lot of time on this point because I’ve already argued that we don’t have a right to self-identify.

But I will go even farther and say that if self-identification hurts people, as it does in the case of genderism, then it must be attacked. Genderism hurts women on a worldwide scale and is used to justify attacking their bodies and human rights. Identification with gender serves to support its power to hurt women, whether the people who identify with it want to do so or not.

It seems that humans will go through any sort of ideological contortion to explain away inconvenient events. I have already written about how people who support violent ideologies portray themselves as the real victims. I’ve also discussed how victims get gaslighted, trivialized, and so on. I want to continue along those lines in this entry.

First, there is the phenomenon that I’ll call “enforced subjectivity.” For instance, we are told that rape statistics are inflated and that we should not count any instance where a woman does not call what happened to her “rape,” because she’d know better. But an instance of rape is an instance of rape regardless of whether the victim calls it rape or not. This is just subjectivism plain and simple. I mean you can see how incredibly stupid this derailing tactic is if you just ask yourself: instead of asking the victim if it was rape, why not ask the perpetrator?

There are many reasons why a rape victim might not call it rape. For one thing, most rapes do not resemble the narrative we’ve been given of a stranger assaulting women in a dark alley or in a park. Most rapes and sexual assaults are committed by dates, sexual partners and family members. Also, many victims do not want to attract the ire of their family and friends by outing a common friend or family member as a rapist. They may also believe that the rape was their fault and therefore not “really rape,” because that’s what we believe about rape victims.

All rape statistics are automatically suspect and their criteria of what constitutes rape should be carefully examined. Subjectivist arguments must be rejected out of hand.

Gender is another area where subjectivity runs rampant, thanks to trans genderism. We are told that individuals are whatever gender they claim to be, but we are also told that anyone who does not actively seek to change their body actually really want to be the gender they were assigned (“cis”). In practice, this amounts to: people’s beliefs and desires are the only thing that matters unless you are not compliant with gender rules about presentation, in which case your beliefs or desires are irrelevant. This is why trans advocacy pushes the oppression of gender rebelling children and homosexuals (especially butch lesbians, which they seek to erase entirely).

Just so I don’t pick only on trans genderists, I will also point out that Christians, who are for the most part traditional genderists, posit that God is male without any biology whatsoever. What does that say about their idea of gender? Well, it shows us that they think authority is a male attribute, even in a being that has no organs or even, you know, a material body. This is not directly subjectivist but, like all Christian premises, goes back to divine subjectivism.

In reality, gender is a social construct legally assigned at birth and which usually does not change throughout your life. This assignment is arbitrary and, while ostensibly based on sex, has nothing to do with sex. There is no logical or biological connection between a person’s sexual organs and their supposedly preferred toys, clothes, games, ways of moving, sexuality, sports or jobs. Genderism, whether traditional or trans, is based on equating a social construct with a biological reality, and hoping their claim has such a degree of support that no one will question it. In that way, it is very much like a religion.

Another area I want to mention is child abuse, of which genderism is an important part but not the whole by far. The subjectivism in child abuse is in the fact that we refuse to identify assaults against children as child abuse. We even have an entire branch of science, psychoanalysis, dedicated to reframing child abuse (thanks to Freud’s cowardice in backing down from exposing the abuse which was, and still is, prevalent).

The support of child abuse is easy to explain by the fact that we hate children. But the erasure of child abuse enacted by the whole society was, until recently, so profound as to eclipse any other. Only recently have we started, only started, to acknowledge that physical and sexual assault against children may be a bad thing (verbal assault and removal of a child’s rights are still considered perfectly normal, unfortunately).

It should not be surprising that child abuse is targeted for the highest level of erasure. After all, children are the most vulnerable members of society, and parents have the most relative power in any relation in any society. Therefore (in accordance with the principle of self-victimhood) it has always been especially crucial that parents portray themselves as the victims and their children as the aggressors. So you get the children-are-innately-evil, toddler-as-seducer, children-as-gullible, teenagers-as-stupid child-hatred party line (and they then turn around and accuse antinatalists of child-hatred, because like all crackpots they desperately need to project).

This leads me to the more general topic of assault by authority figures, most notably cops and soldiers. Whenever an authority figure beats up or kills an innocent civilian, people will be prompt in speaking up in support of the authority figures and in demonizing the victims: in fact, it seems that the more horrifying the event was, the more vicious the attacks against the victims become.

I have already commented on this bizarre phenomenon and given my explanation. The subject is very much related to child abuse. Most of us are victims of child abuse as we grow up, and we grow up internalizing the anger poured against us as being normal. So we turn around and express our anger when someone is, like us, mistreated by an authority figure. The cop or soldier takes the place of the parents, and the victims become substitutes for ourselves, which we are free to hate as much as our parents hated us. For more explanation on this repression and projection mechanism, read Alice Miller‘s work. Arthur Silber, an intellectual heir of Miller (like David Mackler), wrote:

When such modes of thought are established in our psychologies, they cannot be isolated or contained. We deny our own pain — so we must deny the pain of others. If we acknowledge their pain fully and allow ourselves to realize what it means, it will necessarily call up our own wounds. But this remains intolerable and forbidden. In extreme cases, we must dehumanize other human beings: they become “the other,” the less-than-human. By using such devices, we make inflicting untold agonies on another person possible: if they are not even human, it doesn’t matter if we torture them. This is always how we create hell on earth.

Again the self-victimhood principle is applied: the authority figures are portrayed as the “victims” through the demonization of the targets of violence. The authority figure had no choice but to use violence because the targets were disobedient and must have been guilty to be targeted with violence in the first place (a circular argument if there ever was one). This is the same “reasoning” used against rape victims and child abuse victims, but with the righteousness of authority behind it (that is to say, with the authority as a parental figure which therefore can do no wrong).

Frame logic: Individuals are victimised or disadvantaged by the actions of bad, criminal, irresponsible, antisocial types. The “authorities” come to the rescue, in the form of police or other official types with police-like powers. The cops deal with the bad people and protect the good people. (There’s also a “terrorism” variant of the frame, with similar structure, but differently defined roles).

Frame inferences: The cops/authorities are essentially good; the perpetrators are bad; the victims are usually innocent. The authorities maintain order and harmony; the villains disrupt it. Order is a system; bad individuals disrupt order (note the good system / bad individuals dichotomy).

As an aside, I do want to mention that a Gallup poll taken after the Kent State murders revealed that 58% of people blamed the students for their own murder, while 11% blamed the National Guard (the actual murderers).

Atheists talk a great deal about compartmentalization from the standpoint of looking at religion and its absurdities. We look at a religious person and how they can, in one breath, profess belief in the most horrible, irrational moral precepts on the basis of the Bible, and in the next, proclaim their respect for other people. We observe that they seem to insulate their religious beliefs from disproof by putting them in a box and, by doing so, keeping them scrupulously separate from their other, more rational beliefs. So we call that “compartmentalization.”

Stephen Jay Gould’s framing of the relationship between science and religion as “non-overlapping magisteria” represents an attempt at intellectually justifying compartmentalization. Such attempts must necessarily fail in practice, because science and religion are necessarily overlapping: if science does not address origins and the nature of things, then it cannot operate on measurable material facts, and if religion does not address measurable material facts, then it is myth, not religion.

But there’s a lot more to compartmentalization than just putting some irrational beliefs in a box. Not only does it do that, but it also becomes an impervious springboard by which one’s non-material or non-rational beliefs can be applied to material, rational reality without fear of refutation.

It is not just that the Christian fundamentalist believes that women, homosexuals and black people are inherently inferior, and that ey puts these beliefs in a box. It is also that ey uses these beliefs to talk about the real world and to attack real people in real ways. Christianity is a political issue, a social issue, an intellectual issue, an ethical issue, because Christian fundamentalists use their bigotry as an argument and as a motivation in the world, against the world (“the world” is evil, God’s laws are good).

The same thing applies to beliefs about matters of fact. Creationists have one set of epistemic standards that apply to the question of the development of life on this planet, and another set of epistemic standards that apply to everything else, and never the twain shall meet. But they then take those Creationist standards and use them to attack education, evolutionary science, materialist answers about human nature, and so on.

The fact that these beliefs are in the box means that they are elevated to a special status amongst that person’s beliefs: beliefs which inform our actions but which are considered to be immune from refutation. So they necessarily become of prime importance.

Obviously, compartmentalization does not only apply to religion, but I have never heard of this sort of analysis done on anything other than religion. In Compartmentalizing women means you’re a sociopath, blogger Elkballet delves into the issue of compartmentalization and how it applies to porn use.

Her analysis can be applied to any area where irrational beliefs are protected from refutation. In all cases, our million dollar question is: given that our starting position is one of not wanting to harm others and of respecting fairness, how does a person grow up to become a soldier, a rapist, a fundamentalist Christian, or in this case a regular porn user?

Because if the user didn’t compartmentalize it away from rational thought, hide it in a special place in his brain where critical thinking couldn’t touch it, there’s no way he could justify his enjoyment of something clearly painful, degrading, and humiliating. He couldn’t justify enjoying something where this is a high likelihood that at least sometimes the woman is really being raped, is a trafficked woman. So because it feels good, it gets put away someplace where those thoughts can’t apply to it. It would not be possible to enjoy porn as it exists today were it not for the “ability” to place it behind special logic-proof walls.

Elkballet deduces from her examination of the psychology of compartmentalization that this process is the natural result of our enjoyment clashing with one’s natural morals.

But how does this apply to religion or statism? In those cases, we’re not talking about enjoyment but conditioning; the case of pornography merely adds a step before the conditioning. People are hooked on pornography and then receive its messages, while people generally start by receiving religious dogma (whether they come to enjoy it later is another issue). No one is forced to watch pornography by their parents or by society (although the sexist message itself is present everywhere and can hardly be avoided).

So in those cases it is the dogma that clashes with our natural morals. Every case has a different form of rationalization, different default responses, different thought-stoppers, but they all have them.

* In the case of Christian believers, we have “God is good itself and the source of all good,” “God knows better than we do,” “God works in mysterious ways,” “Christian morality is absolute and necessary anyway.”

* In the case of statists, we have “they’re just bad apples,” “the law maintains order in society,” “if you’re not evil you have nothing to fear,” and as a corollary, “if you have something to fear, you must be evil.”

* In the case of natalism, we have “well, life is not fair,” “new people can experience all that’s wonderful in this world,” and “I have the right to have children.”

* In the case of feminism, we have individualism and liberalism acting as general rationalizations (“it’s her fault for putting herself at risk,” “we’re all equal now so everything that happens to you is your own fault”), and evopsych and other forms of gender essentialism act as thought-stoppers (“men can’t help what they do, so there’s no point in arguing about it,” “that’s the way women should be”).

Elkballet also discusses how compartmentalization piggybacks on existing hierarchies in order to dissociate between “good” and “bad” people or situations.

Compartmentalization.. causes the user to feel entitled to label women as human or not, real people or things to fuck, etc… Only a person in a position of entitlement could experience this type of god complex, deciding who is and isn’t human, who does and doesn’t deserve abuse based on whether she turns him on… This means some people actually begin to feel some woman (all of whom are thinking, breathing, feeling, human beings) deserve to be raped, deserve to be beaten, tortured, murdered, etc… Because this user has learned to compartmentalize. When something revolting happens to a woman, she can be compartmentalized away as a “disgusting pig” or a deserving “slut” because porn has taught him that some women deserve this treatment. Some women are born for this, to be fucked brutally, to be raped.

In parallel with this, the porn user also feels that he is one of the “good” guys, that he is sublimating his (inescapable and biological, according to the rhetoric) desire to hurt women through something “unreal” (because otherwise he would be painting himself as someone who derives enjoyment from someone else’s suffering), and that it’s okay because everyone’s doing it or everyone should be doing it.

All compartmentalization partakes of these same processes. Again let me review:

* Christian believers divide people in saved and unsaved; the unsaved (unlike actual humans) deserve eternal torment, and they deserve to be persecuted in life. The unsaved are not worthy of being treated like human beings because they can’t be moral anyway.

* Statists divide people in criminals and non-criminals, citizens and foreigners, “legal” humans and “illegal” humans, productive and unproductive people (in a capitalist context), and so on. Criminals deserve punishment by virtue of not obeying the law, foreigners deserve to die because they aren’t protected by the law, “illegal” humans deserve to be separated from their families, unproductive people deserve to be poor. Generally the rationalization here is that people who don’t obey the law are innately evil (and usually that most or all people are evil and deserve to be punished) and that morality can only be maintained by government fiat.

* Most natalists hold to categories of “lives that are worth starting” and “lives that are not worth starting” (although some extremists do believe that all lives, no matter how diseased or handicapped, are worth starting), and use this to “prove” that most acts of procreation are justified. This is not hierarchical in nature, but the hierarchy between parents and children is used to justify the “right to reproduce” and props up other natalist arguments (“I don’t care what the consequences are to my child because I decide what’s good for them”).

* Anti-feminists obviously support the gender hierarchy, and they support their belief in the gender hierarchy through various forms of essentialism, that women deserve to be inferior because of some biological or psychological defect. The flipside of that is the fact that women deserve to be raped, mutilated and killed because men’s equally unwavering attributes (“men can’t control themselves,” “men are biologically made to rape”).

She also talks about this concept of “good porn.” Porn users regularly trot out the bizarre concept of “feminist porn” (which has been sighted about as often as Bigfoot, another mythical creature) as some kind of proof that pornography is not woman-hating. They argue that if only all porn was replaced by “feminist porn,” pornography would be all right.

But feminists know that this is nonsense. Pornography is inherently objectifying and violent whether it’s “feminist” or not. An evil system is not improved by giving it even more credibility while addressing no issue whatsoever. Putting women in charge of pornography and changing the actresses so that some of them are fat or black doesn’t address anything that’s wrong about pornography, but calling it “feminist” does give it credibility it does not deserve.

Likewise, radicals in all other areas are very well aware that gradualism or moderation is ultimately futile. Trying to encourage a government to moderate its military spending has never actually lowered military spending. Telling Christians to moderate their beliefs does not get them to do so. Telling people to make less children rarely has a positive effect.

What does work is changing the incentives of society itself. Religion becomes more moderate because it is dragged along by social consensus. Governments only channel more resources towards welfare programs, and stop attacking the rights of the poor, when people stand up for their rights and take to the streets. As for not having children, people having a livelihood that doesn’t depend on using children as virtual slave workers thanks to industrialization seems to be helping quite a bit, and so does working against domestic violence.

Another example of moderation, as regards to neo-liberalism this time, is the belief in “responsible consumption”; the theory being that by moderating our consumption, by consuming the right things, and by recycling our consumed products, we can help the environment and stop exploiting people in the third world. But we know that would change absolutely nothing. Most of the pollution is generated by industries, not by landfills. Moderating consumption will not slow down the economic growth in China and India, which will dwarf any slowing down of consumption in the Western world.

The gender hierarchy provides porn users with the tools to objectify and categorize women, because the belief in the inferiority of women comes with its own rationalizations and categories (such as “sluts,” “bitches,” “dykes,” etc). These categories are filled with beliefs which further the aim of the porn user (“sluts can’t be raped,” “unlike most women they really love doing this,” “sluts deserve to be roughed up”). Compartmentalization leads to objectification leads to a culture of violence and depravity.

I have previously written about the humbug of “maternal love.” However, I did not examine the larger problem of the belief that love can co-exist with authority.

My basic premise is that love and control are opposites, that in order to control someone one cannot love them or vice-versa. So the issue then becomes, how can one claim to love a person which is under their total control?

Obviously we can lie to ourselves. We can pretend to love that person, or we can be indoctrinated so much that we think we love that person. There’s also plenty of reasons why people would simply lie. It is in the interest of any politician to claim that they care about their constituents, for example.

But the most fundamental form of this disconnect lies in the relation between parent and child. When we are children, we are told again and again that our parents love us the most in the entire world, that we should love our parents and that there is no more glorious form of love than that between a parent and a child. On the other hand, our parents constantly tell us what to do and order our lives around their needs and wishes.

I think this is a fundamental problem. We were all raised to believe that our parents are the epitome of love, and therefore we associate pure love with obedience and control. The effect is magnified when one has abusive parents, but even when parents are not abusive, they are still “in control.”

The child is learning that these methods of control, domination and manipulation are expressions of love. Just as the child cannot doubt his parents’ “good intentions,” it is intolerable to think that his parents might not love him since he depends on them for survival. That is, and despite most parents’ inability to appreciate the cruelty involved, the child is learning that cruelty is love. In those cases where parents inflict physical violence on a child (spanking, slapping and all other forms of physical abuse are never “okay”), and such violence remains distressingly common, the child is learning that violence is love. (Please note: one adult version of these beliefs is that bombing will bring the victims “freedom.”)

I’ve culled the quotes in this entry from an entry on Arthur Silber’s blog (Once Upon a Time). If you don’t already read his blog, I highly recommend it. There is probably not a better writer on the blogosphere today, and yet he is almost completely unknown. It’s absolutely unbelievable.

Anyway, I have been talking a lot about the deleterious effect of the parenting hierarchy on children growing up, but this has to be by far the worse mechanism operating here. It is profoundly insidious because none can live without love and one’s parents are its necessary source, at least during early childhood. Therefore the child has no choice but to accept the equation of love with control. This is an extremely strong mold which stays with us for the rest of our lives.

Given this, there’s no reason to wonder why hierarchies have such a strong hold on people’s lives, especially in restimulation, and why people will cling so easily to authoritarian figures, including God. We’re all programmed to equate love with control, and in many cases verbal or physical abuse.

I mentioned God for a reason. Fundamentalist Christians hold on to clearly immoral doctrines despite their blatant immorality. For example, it’s very hard to convince them that slavery is wrong, because God supports slavery in the Bible. And yet they can turn around and profess that God is the source of all love (as stated in 1 John 4:7-8).

Of course, the theory that God is a substitute father is a very old one, and I don’t claim any novelty there. The concept of the substitute father figure and mother figure has become part of our popular culture. But people have been very reluctant, and for good reason, to discuss the reason why such things exist, or if they do they dismiss it with rationalizations like “well, if you have an absent father, you need a father-figure in your life.”

But the people who cling the most to authority typically have abusive parents, not absent parents. I don’t claim to have a scientific study to back this up, but from what I’ve read about the most extreme examples, such as top Nazi officials, cult followers, the most extreme fundamentalist Christians, and so on, leads me to think in that direction. Part of that is an unconscious desire to reenact the unresolved abuse onto convenient “enemies.”

God, the dictator or the cult leader are obvious father substitutes, but any form of authority can serve as a father substitute. The State can be a father substitute, with the law code as its moral authority. So can a corporation, an ideology, or any other group which has official or unofficial authorities and some system of moral authority (i.e. some way by which good and evil are established for the group).

Even though we are indoctrinated to believe both of its components, the paradox is too obvious to be simply ignored, especially in cases where it is clear that the authority concerned does not love you or care for you in any way.

Extremely abusive parents are the most obvious example. We observe that in those cases, children are told that they must still love their parents by virtue of them being your parents, and that the parents cannot be blamed. In fact we have an entire industry (Freudian psychotherapy) devoted to whitewashing parents’ crimes and blaming children for their own sexual abuse, physical and verbal abuse, and so on. In general, people who don’t love their parents are seen as abnormal and hating one’s parents is considered intrinsically wrong.

So there is this concept that love is incompatible with harm, but never obedience. Obedience cannot in any way be wrong, unless of course it is obedience to “bad people,” but that’s not a result of obedience itself being wrong.

Now take a completely different example, statism. Most people are very well aware that the government does not have their best interests in mind, in fact that governments do not function on the basis of general interest, and that politicians are corrupt. And yet most people also support the government in its concrete actions and shout down anyone who speaks consistently with the premises I’ve just listed.

Again, we see similar responses to the ones uses against children: we are told that it’s really the victim’s fault and that anyone who was insulted, abused, violated or killed by the government in the exercise of its functions must have deserved it. We are told that one must obey the laws even if those laws are wrong, simply because they are the law (as we must love and obey our parents simply because they are our parents). I have already discussed the response specifically as regards to war.

If cornered, the statist may start using might makes right rhetoric, which is merely another way of admitting defeat (since “might” has nothing to do with ethics). But it “proves” that control is ultimately “good” (right). This of course is always the desired conclusion.

Those people who are committed to the right wing of the political spectrum, which includes both liberals and conservatives, are on board with the belief that control over others is caring for others. They just fight over what kind of control is best, just like parents may disagree on whether beating a child with a rod, spanking, or constant guilt is the best way to raise a child (hint: none of these are things adult human beings should do to children human beings).

Another way to stop people from thinking further about the paradox is to distract them with a game. Democracy is a particularly elegant example of this strategy: fool people into thinking they may have some chance of choosing the kind of control which will be used in the future, and you’ve basically destroyed any kind of resistance. Resistance will from that point forward only arise if the system fails to fool people or if enough people are dispossessed by the system, which in a well-functioning democracy should not happen.

A successful democracy suppresses dissent while giving people no more power than they had previously. This has always been the purpose of democracy and it has for the most part been very successful. The same general sort of strategy is used in corporate capitalism and even parenting (the rationale that “once you have children, then you can raise them however you want,” that is to say, you can abuse them as we’ve abused you, which is not power but rather psychological compulsion).

One category of people who are used to rationalizing and twisting the union of control and love are BDSM practitioners. The main rationalization they give to the paradox is that the sub is the one who’s “really in control.” Again this is the same “you’re really in control” rhetoric, so no surprises there. In essence, the BDSM “contract” and other “safety” measures are time-wasting distractions from the naked fact of control (dominance and submission).

There is no more reason to believe BDSM practitioners on this subject than we should believe politicians who tell us democracy means “the people” have all the power. But not only is the argument factually false, but it is also a red herring; even if power was actually in the hands of some other people, that would not make their form of domination any better than the one we have now. Because in the case of politics, a true monopoloid “rule of the people” would merely be a more direct war of all against all (instead of the class war we have today).

Unlike adults, children have the disadvantage of being utterly depending on their parents, therefore children have to learn to anticipate their parents’ feelings and to put them ahead of their own. The child learns to internalize parental manipulation, a blueprint for school and the workplace, where rules and mores must be internalized so the person can conform and be “successful.” The child’s, and the adult’s, feelings are “childish” and “individualistic.”

[The mother] tells the young boy that he did a “bad thing,” and that he did so knowing that it was a “bad thing.” The mother also tells the boy that she “was very disappointed,” and that she “really didn’t like what he did.” In this way, the mother demands that the child behave in a certain way because of the parent’s own needs and feelings. Those needs and feelings have nothing to do with the reality of the child’s experience, just as they have nothing to do with the facts concerning the dangers of a very wet bathroom. In effect, the mother is demanding that the young child behave “properly” so that the mother herself will not be made unhappy. And the source of the unhappiness will be the child himself.

Because most adults have internalized these methods of control and manipulation — and, which is far worse, because they view such methods as right — the reality of the effects of such parental domination are largely inaccessible to them. For the child, the threat of the withdrawal of the parent’s love is profoundly threatening. Although he may not be able to explain it explicitly (in the case of a very young child), the child is fully aware that he depends on the parent for survival and for life itself. If he makes his mother too unhappy, and if his mother therefore no longer loves him, what will happen to him? Like most children, he will do anything to make his mother happy. He will obey. Because the child senses that his life depends on his parents, he must believe something more. It would be intolerable to the child to believe that his parents intend to harm him and, in fact, most parents have rendered themselves unable to appreciate the harm they are inflicting. So the child must believe in his parents’ goodness, and in their “good intentions.”

A lot more can be said about the insanity of parenting. But I also wanted to broach another paradox. It is said that one should be proud of one’s culture, one’s country or one’s religion. But this is a bizarre statement because it implies that one must both be proud and be obedient. How can one be proud and at the same time be subservient to someone else?

Perhaps I am odd in thinking this, but it seems to me that pride is something you get from doing something yourself. I suppose one could be proud of something one gets others to do, as well (although I would argue that such pride is misguided). But how can one be proud of something one did for someone else? No one’s proud of the fact that they work for someone else’s benefit.

On gender specifically, how can masculinity be reconciled with obedience? I ask this because masculinity is often associated with independence and individuality. I personally do not think these qualities should be associated with any gender. But our current concept of masculinity is associated both with independence and with obedience, and I can’t see how these two can be logically reconciled.

To obey and surrender one’s moral compass to an authority is a fundamental betrayal of the self. It should not just be incompatible with being a man, it should be incompatible with being human. Know that when you play the Conspiracy games and become a cheerleader for an army, a country, a religion, or any other in-group, you are making yourself less human.

Whyyyy are these people so aaaangry??? Whyyyy don’t they just stay home and write letters or something?? I’m sure glad the police is there to tone police them.

Tone policing is a term used on the Internet to designate attempts to curb speech based on its aggressiveness or rudeness. When an aggressive tone is used as a reason to reject an argument, tone policing is simply invalid:

The tone argument is a form of derailment, or a red herring, because the tone of a statement is independent of the content of the statement in question, and calling attention to it distracts from the issue at hand. Drawing attention to the tone rather than content of a statement can allow other parties to avoid engaging with sound arguments presented in that statement, thus undermining the original party’s attempt to communicate and effectively shutting them down.

I’m sure its proponents would reply that the point of tone policing is not to invalidate arguments but simply to make people be more considerate of others, and that ideas must be sold in a way that appeases people (for a similar concept, see “gatekeeper”). The underlying premises are those of groupthink and pragmatism; the proponents want you to identify with the group and its flourishing, and they want you to believe that the end justifies the means. The former is a matter of allegiance, but the latter is false in any case: it is not true that the success of an abstract idea overrides all other ethical concerns.

In what kind of situations should one express an idea aggressively? One type of such situation is when a person is detaching emself from a destructive, repressive worldview. In such a case, the healthiest thing to do is to realize and express the destructive, repressive nature of that worldview in order to heal at a personal level. This is dismissed by gatekeepers as “ranting” or “angry” (as if anger can’t be healthy!).

Another type of situation would be when one is confronted with a clear, incontrovertible evil which one or many people are trying to normalize. In that case being “nice” only makes the situation worse, because it appears as if you’re agreeing that the evil in question is not clear and incontrovertible, but rather worthy of reasonable discussion. One must be aggressive both in confronting and denouncing evil.

Appeasement never works. Nothing morally wrong has been solved by people curbing their rudeness. Minorities and other oppressed groups are always told to curb their rudeness so they’ll shut up, basically. It’s a tactic used to reframe justified anger as rudeness, radicalism as extremism. Anger becomes integrated with the stereotypes we associate with minorities, including black people, feminists, and more recently atheists, and the pressure on these groups to stop being angry becomes not only permanent but internalized as well. It then becomes part of the role of gatekeepers to attack anyone who portrays their group in a “bad light.”

So it shouldn’t be surprising that the whole tone policing process is a huge double standard. Women’s speech is devalued, called shrill or angry when it’s aggressive, and simply rejected when it’s not aggressive enough; men’s aggressive speech, on the other hand, is considered manly and competent.

This has a host of consequences. It means that men bullies get a free pass by virtue of being men. It means that women will be less likely to be forceful and therefore less likely to be acknowledged as competent leaders. It means that women in positions of power are treated as being inferior because they are deviating from their true nature.

And, I argue, you won’t recognize a woman as a potential leader. Not because women can’t or don’t want to be rude — rather, because women are likely to already have been conditioned to be nice, and even if they haven’t, a hypothetical woman who led a major open-source project would never get away with being rude to people the way Linus is…

If you still need evidence that there’s a double standard, there it is. I think what’s happening here is that whatever men do gets defined as being effective, by definition, because they are men. It’s a little bit like how women frequently get describe as “emotional”, but this (often pejorative) label is rarely applied to men who are raging out, because apparently anger isn’t an emotion. (Thanks to Brenda Fine for originally pointing this out to me.) When a guy yells at his team members, he’s “being a leader”, “getting stuff done”, not wasting time with trivialities like being nice. But when a woman suggests that the whole team would be better off without the yelling, she’s “being oversensitive”, “reading too much into it”, wanting to stop everyone from ever saying “fuck” again. She can’t possibly be saying it because she has the best interests of the project in mind — because by definition, women are off-topic.

When women display the necessary confidence in their skills and comfort with power, they run the risk of being regarded as ‘competent but cold’; the bitch, the ice queen, the iron maiden, the ballbuster, the battle axe, the dragon lady… the sheer number of synonyms is telling.
Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender

I’ve been talking about how we sometimes need to express ourselves forcefully, especially when confronting evil. Oppressed groups have to not only confront the evils done to them, but have to argue with the privileged people who benefit from those very same evils. This means that there is plenty of opportunity for the privileged to use tone policing against their opponents.

Often, people who have the privilege of being listened to and taken seriously level accusations of “incivility” as a silencing tactic, and label as “incivil” any speech or behavior that questions their privilege. For example, some men label any feminist thought or speech as hostile or impolite; there is no way for anybody to question male power or privilege without being called rude or aggressive. Likewise, some white people label any critical discussion of race, particularly when initiated by people of color, as incivil.

And here’s my real problem with tone policing. No matter how rude someone can be in response to an issue, the rudeness can never be as bad as the issue itself. Swearing at rape apologists can never be as bad as rape. Insulting racists can never be as bad as racism. Tone policing is always a diversion because the real hate is not people being rude on a forum post or blog entry, it’s people excluding and physically abusing others in the real world.

We find this is a universal phenomenon. For example, trans activists throw their rage at radical feminists for being anti-genderists. But it is not radical feminists that are going on the street attacking and killing transgender people, or suing transgender people for using the wrong bathrooms. Genderism is their real enemy, but it is genderism that they defend by attacking radfems. In this they share the problem of being unable to identify the enemy with other subservient groups.

But my point here is that no matter how offensive anti-genderism may be to any transgender individual, it’s still not as bad as the actual harm being done to everyone by genderism in practice. Aggressive speech in the name of virtue may be inappropriate but it can never be evil.

A white student may feel discomfort when it’s pointed out to him how he has benefited from structural racism, but to compare that discomfort to discrimination is a false equivalency. Hurt feelings hurt, but it is not oppression.
Shannon Gibney

NOTE: This is a repost, but I’ve added a number of new items to the list.

***

A: “How could you arrive late? I gave you very specific directions on how to get here.”
B: “There was a roadblock on the I-20 exit you told me to take, so I had to do a detour, which cost me some time.”
A: “That’s impossible! I’ve given these directions to thousands of people, and I was never told that any of them ever arrived late. You must be lying.”

B: “There was a roadblock on the I-20 exit you told me to take, so I had to do a detour, which cost me some time.”
A: “Look, the map is never wrong. Do you see a roadblock on it? No. So you can’t possibly have seen one. It was a hallucination. You must be on drugs or something. What a terrible person you are!”

B: “There was a roadblock on the I-20 exit you told me to take, so I had to do a detour, which cost me some time.”
A: “People like you are so bad at driving, aren’t they… Pity.”

B: “There was a roadblock on the I-20 exit you told me to take, so I had to do a detour, which cost me some time.”
A: “You are suffering from a mental condition that makes it harder for people like you to navigate roads. It’s okay, we have medical treatment for people like you…”

B: “There was a roadblock on the I-20 exit you told me to take, so I had to do a detour, which cost me some time.”
A: “Only dishonest people would take a detour. You must have made it up and used that extra time to commit a crime. I’m gonna call the police!”

B: “There was a roadblock on the I-20 exit you told me to take, so I had to do a detour, which cost me some time.”
A: “I ordered you to take this route AND to arrive here on time. You failed to obey my orders. What a disappointment you turned out to be. Why can’t you be here on time like everyone else?”

B: “There was a roadblock on the I-20 exit you told me to take, so I had to do a detour, which cost me some time.”
A: “Suck it up and be more professional. No one wants to hear some bullshit roadblock story.”

B: “There was a roadblock on the I-20 exit you told me to take, so I had to do a detour, which cost me some time.”
A: “Come on. You know in your heart that’s just not true. Stop lying to yourself.”

B: “There was a roadblock on the I-20 exit you told me to take, so I had to do a detour, which cost me some time.”
A: “Excuses, excuses… take some fucking responsibility for your actions. It’s your fault if you’re late, no one else’s. Don’t go blaming the roadblock for your own personal failings.”

B: “There was a roadblock on the I-20 exit you told me to take, so I had to do a detour, which cost me some time.”
A: “How dare you talk back to me? No one cares if there was a roadblock. It was probably your fault anyway! You can’t do anything right! Just shut up!”

B: “There was a roadblock on the I-20 exit you told me to take, so I had to do a detour, which cost me some time.”
A: “You always have some excuse for your lackadaisical behaviour. If you don’t stop being so rebellious, we’re not going to serve you any dessert this evening. It’s as simple as that!”

B: “There was a roadblock on the I-20 exit you told me to take, so I had to do a detour, which cost me some time.”
A: “That’s so self-serving of you! If you hadn’t been late, you wouldn’t have come up with some cockamamie excuse. Good people arrive on time, and when they don’t, they take responsibility for their actions and don’t have to invoke irrelevant roadblocks.”

B: “There was a roadblock on the I-20 exit you told me to take, so I had to do a detour, which cost me some time.”
A: “Sure, that’s easy for you to say, but think of the time road workers had to take to set up the roadblock… they have it much harder than you! Stop your whining already!”

B: “There was a roadblock on the I-20 exit you told me to take, so I had to do a detour, which cost me some time.”
A: “All right, but think of all the times when you came here and had a great drive. So stop talking about roadblocks, it’s like you have an obsession or something…”

B: “There was a roadblock on the I-20 exit you told me to take, so I had to do a detour, which cost me some time.”
A: “You need to stay out here and cool off until you change your tune. I don’t want to see someone as agitated as you around the dinner table.”

B: “There was a roadblock on the I-20 exit you told me to take, so I had to do a detour, which cost me some time.”
A: “Are you trying to make me feel guilty for this? Implying that my directions were bad? This is your fault, not mine! You were the one driving!”

B: “There was a roadblock on the I-20 exit you told me to take, so I had to do a detour, which cost me some time.”
A: “Oh fine, just make us wait for you… as if we don’t have anything else to do… It’s not like you care about us anyway…”

B: “There was a roadblock on the I-20 exit you told me to take, so I had to do a detour, which cost me some time.”
A: “What would your parents think if they heard you were late? Stop trying to give them a heart attack and start acting more respectably!”

B: “There was a roadblock on the I-20 exit you told me to take, so I had to do a detour, which cost me some time.”
A: “As if you didn’t mean for this delay to happen… come on, we know you like to make us wait on you. You are so arrogant…”

B: “There was a roadblock on the I-20 exit you told me to take, so I had to do a detour, which cost me some time.”
A: “No one I’ve ever talked to has experienced a roadblock, so by induction your statement is false. There, it’s logically demonstrated. Now stop holding on to this delusion of yours.”

B: “There was a roadblock on the I-20 exit you told me to take, so I had to do a detour, which cost me some time.”
A: “Your statement that you experienced a roadblock is ultimately just a subjective opinion. Why should I care about your subjective opinion? In order to be valid, your statement must be true for all people and all times.”

B: “There was a roadblock on the I-20 exit you told me to take, so I had to do a detour, which cost me some time.”
A: “You can’t prove that roadblocks exist, can you? You could have had a hallucination, seen a mirage, or a hologram, or perhaps you were kidnapped by aliens who put your brain in a vat. Until you can disprove these possibilities, I can’t believe what you’re saying.”

B: “There was a roadblock on the I-20 exit you told me to take, so I had to do a detour, which cost me some time.”
A: “It’s fine that you were late because of a roadblock, but why aren’t you even mentioning all the people who are late every day because of traffic? You’re just a bigot!”

B: “There was a roadblock on the I-20 exit you told me to take, so I had to do a detour, which cost me some time.”
A: “You are a bitch, and bitches always lie, therefore you are lying. Why are you such a bitch? Is it because of feminism? Feminism is terrible because it turns all women into bitches; I know this because I dated a woman and she was a real bitch, while women in the past were sweet and holy. Anyway, get out of my house, you bitch!”

B: “There was a roadblock on the I-20 exit you told me to take, so I had to do a detour, which cost me some time.”
A: “Well, are you sure that you actually had to take a detour? Like, couldn’t you have gone through the roadblock really carefully? Couldn’t you have talked to the workers so they’d let you pass? It just seems to me like you just gave up, you fucking spineless coward. I won’t believe you had to take a detour unless you bring me a note from a policeman.”

B: “There was a roadblock on the I-20 exit you told me to take, so I had to do a detour, which cost me some time.”
A: “I told you to stop driving around in a car of the wrong color. It gives off the wrong vibrations for your astrological sign. You need to get a different car as soon as possible.”

B: “There was a roadblock on the I-20 exit you told me to take, so I had to do a detour, which cost me some time.”
A: “Everything happens for a reason. The roadblock was placed there by the universe so you could take a more scenic route. Isn’t life wonderful?”

B: “There was a roadblock on the I-20 exit you told me to take, so I had to do a detour, which cost me some time.”
A: “That roadblock only exists in your mind. Stop thinking so negatively and you’ll always be here on time. Otherwise, you’ll keep pulling these things into your life.”

B: “There was a roadblock on the I-20 exit you told me to take, so I had to do a detour, which cost me some time.”
A: “This imaginary roadblock is a reflection of your own feelings of inadequacy about yourself. If you only got help and cured those feelings, you wouldn’t be having these problems.”

B: “There was a roadblock on the I-20 exit you told me to take, so I had to do a detour, which cost me some time.”
A: “This imaginary roadblock is created by spiritual entities which latch on to your mind and feed you negativity. Give me money so I can help you get these entities out of your mind, and you’ll have total control over your driving.”

B: “There was a roadblock on the I-20 exit you told me to take, so I had to do a detour, which cost me some time.”
A: “Your problem is that you don’t have enough faith. Let go and let God. With faith, you can do anything. The fact that this happened to you only proves that you don’t have enough faith.”

B: “There was a roadblock on the I-20 exit you told me to take, so I had to do a detour, which cost me some time.”
A: “I don’t care what your excuse is! Being late is morally wrong. You are sick in the head! We need to take away your car so you can’t go anywhere ever again. You are forbidden to ever come here!”

B: “There was a roadblock on the I-20 exit you told me to take, so I had to do a detour, which cost me some time.”
A: “Die Roadblocked Scum!”

B: “There was a roadblock on the I-20 exit you told me to take, so I had to do a detour, which cost me some time.”
A jumps on B and starts beating him up, screaming obscenities.

B: “There was a roadblock on the I-20 exit you told me to take, so I had to do a detour, which cost me some time.”
A draws a gun and shoots B.

.

Do these answers seem normal to you?

And yet, we use these exact same answers to invalidate people’s feelings constantly, without realizing how absolutely bizarre and insane they are… Is it any wonder that we are all warped in the head, when we are fed this insanity regularly?

Fear seems to be wasted a great deal on things which are not at all powerful or horrible. People fear things as abstract as the redefinition of marriage or the disintegration of Western society. There is a lot of legitimate fear about losing one’s job or dying of a disease, obviously; I am more concerned with the illegitimate fears, because there seems to be a lot more of it going around. The personal fears are kept locked up in people’s brains, but the illegitimate fears are bandied about and spread like venereal disease.

A good example I’ve written about lately is the fear that determinism will be widely accepted. I think most people would agree with me that this is a pretty abstract fear, as are the claims that human life will be devalued or that Western society is under threat. What would be the concrete results of determinism being widely accepted? I don’t think those fundamentalists have even tried to imagine what a deterministic society might be like, or is likely to look like.

Another one is the fear of Hell. Many otherwise convinced atheists live with that fear for a long time. This is because Hell and its dramatic images live in their imaginary, not in their rational faculties.

Or take a more mundane example, like “Stranger Danger.” Now, we all know that’s a damn lie, and a dangerous lie. But it appeals to the widespread narrative of strangers lurking in the dark waiting to kidnap and rape children. Again, it appeals to the images that have been engraved in our imaginary, it is pre-rational, it is insidious and a form of indoctrination.

The main feeling that parents experience, I think, is not contentment or happiness, but fear. Everything they do to their children seems to have a component of fear to it, fear that the child will grow up “wrong.” What “wrong” actually means in this case is “maladapted to this society,” which in practice means that the child must be mentally broken in order to fit in our bizarro society.

In addition to a human being which is, in emself, complete, a child is also a potentiality. There is no obvious way to predict how a child will grow and mature. But a parent, through their ownership claim, seeks to control the child, so there is a fundamental tension there; they seek to control a child’s future but they really cannot. So there is a constant fear of a terrible hypothetical future for the child if ey “fails to adapt” to our dysfunctional society.

In all cases, we are talking about fear emerging from the imagination, the fear of a disastrous hypothetical futures, because we can always imagine greater threats in the future than the ones that actually exist in the present. A maxim is “better the devil you know.” Uncertainty triggers insecurity, insecurity triggers anxiety, and anxiety demands a remedy. This is true in all spheres.

Radicalism is a good way to stimulate people’s fear reflex, because it is innately counter-culture, and therefore summons up an uncertain future. Atheism triggers fears of the chaos of a world without the dogmatic, relativist morality of religion. Anarchism triggers fear of the chaos of an egalitarian world, devoid of obedience and submission. Antinatalism triggers fear of the chaos of a world without human life. Radical feminism triggers fear of the chaos of a society without gender roles. In all cases, fear is motivated not by arguments (although arguments may be used as rationalizations) but by the realization of radical difference.

But there is a deeper correlation between fear and chaos, between fear and counter-culture. We already know from observing society that fear makes people flock to hierarchies (“order”). The kind of hierarchy depends on the kind of fear: for instance, fear of death pushes people towards religion.

The explanation given is that people who feel threatened fall back on the culture and values of the groups towards which they feel allegiance. The contrast to the “chaos” of radicalism, obviously, is the “order” of hierarchies, where everyone knows their place and everyone has a role to play. Hierarchies represent a security blanket because they give you easy answers about how to organize society: there are inferiors and superiors, the superiors deserve their status (for whatever ridiculous reason), and the inferiors should obey the superiors in exchange for their lives or livelihood.

The fact that these answers fail time and time again, or the fact that hierarchies are not really a form of order and egalitarianism is not chaos, does not prevent the believer’s fear, because this emotion in based in the imaginary, not in rationality.

It is not, I think, a lack of imagination as much as a fertile imagination unbounded by rationality. The fact that people imagine all kinds of disaster scenarios in this fashion kinda proves that point. This indicates to me that the best way to combat it is by presenting an alternate and more credible narrative (such as my reframing of anarchism) and by presenting an alternate future.